I keep seeing lots of people saying "LLMs are like compilers/assemblers for prompts"

[pautasso@scholar.social]

@cwebber if, just like with asm, reading and reviewing generated code is not longer a necessary thing, then the productivity bottleneck shifts to how much time is spent "engineering" the prompt.

[eviloatmeal@ak.angelstrapped.com]

@cwebber @joeyh If someone invented an LLM that gave me powerups and metaprogression, I might be slightly interested.

[littledetritus@geraffel.social]

@cwebber This might actually be subject to change though.

Njoy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22954

Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)

tl;dr: LLMs are coming closer and closer to conveying reproducible outputs. One could be under the impression that if trained on the same data and towards a certain size asymtotic behaviour would be a resonable expectation, becaus that happens with large numbers in statistics.

What a ... surprise.

[cwebber@social.coop]

@ansuz @joeyh And of course there is the question, what is and isn't a compiler? Aren't all functions compilers?

Indeed, Blender's rendering system is in many ways a compiler for images.

But we don't use that way, because it's not helpful, even though Blender and ffmpeg are MORE of compilers than LLMs are. People are reaching for "LLMs might be compilers!" because of the thing they want it to *do* rather than how it *acts*, even though Blender and ffmpeg are by far, under those definitions, much more of compilers than LLMs are.

[cwebber@social.coop]

@ansuz @joeyh To put it another way: even though we could call Blender and ffmpeg compilers in a way that would be hard to argue with, we don't, and it wouldn't be useful if we did because we wouldn't understand each other well.

Please don't call LLMs compilers.

[kye@tech.lgbt]

@cwebber The metaphor I reach for is processors. They're language coprocessors, and language is messy in a way most things coprocessors have done aren't. We're at "Hello World" in figuring out what to do with them.

[srazkvt@tech.lgbt]

@cwebber ok i'm going to be very annoying here but

don't some old versions of msvc choose certain optimisations randomly ?

[aparrish@friend.camp]

@cwebber for me, the question isn't determinism but epistemology. the llm "compiles" by chaining predictions based on statistics which are derived from empirical data—i.e. its model of the "compilation" process is "usually when there's x in the input, there's y in the output." a conventional compiler is based on deductive reasoning about how x requires y. the former is totally parasitic on the latter (i.e. if the underlying reasoning didn't exist, empirical data on its operation couldn't exist)

[natty@astolfo.social]

@cwebber@social.coop to be fair I don't think determinism is a defining property of compilers

I should make a stochastic compiler (whatever that means)

[natty@astolfo.social]

@alina@girldick.gay @cwebber@social.coop @joeyh@sunbeam.city try mewgenics try mewgenics try mewgenics

[hackbod@mastodon.social]

@ansuz @joeyh @cwebber

Ah but even if you can use a specific seed and try to use this to call it a "compiler", your compiler here is the very specific sets of weights within that model, and any change breaks its determinism. I think there being one and exactly one possible implementation to get the specified set of outputs can count as an actual compiler.

[krutonium@social.treehouse.systems]

@kkarhan @eramdam @cwebber
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